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Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 21, Number 1, pp. 5771, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. 2013 by the American
Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/traa.12000.
57
DECOLONIZING FEMINIST
ANTHROPOLOGY
To borrow a concept from the eminent historian
Carter G. Woodson, there is a problem of miseducation in anthropological thought and pointedly
in feminist anthropology in instruction, research,
and writing about Black anthropology and Black
feminist anthropology. The ways of miseducation in anthropology are the glaring omissions in
citations, and exclusion from discussions that
establish recognition in the eld. And my goal in
this article is to examine the how, why, and where
exclusions occur and the consequences of
omission.
To tell the story straight requires contextualizing and laying a foundation. To do so, we
must unpack how exclusion, racism, and elitism
can be carried out in the name of feminist anthropology. There is homework to be done on the
home front, meaning in the politics of the department and in the structure of courses, particularly
those critical to the development of the discipline.
I use the notion of homework beyond Kamala
Visweswarans use of the phrase (1994:101). Here,
homework refers more than anthropological eldwork into U.S. life and culture, but to literally
casting a critical eye and ear in the oce, in the
classroom, in the departmental meeting, and in the
entire academic praxis. Brackette Williams
(1995:25) captures the expansive concept of
homework. She says that doing ones homework
is to gather information in order to be an
informed citizen capable of acting in a morally
conscientious manner toward a particular category
of persons who share the identity fellow citizen.
Homework in this instance is about understanding
what must be done, why it must be done, and
what are the consequences are doing it one way
and not another. Williams purposely left aside
the ongoing dilemmas of eldwork among the primarily non-White, indigenous, poor, and workingclass women whose lives and experiences that
anthropologists represent on the printed page, on
lm, or in other discursive texts. In this context
homework must be applied to all situations particularly when those fellow citizens are ones own
colleagues.
In their introduction to Situated Lives, editors
Louise Lamphere, Helene Ragone, and Patricia
Zavella (1997:3) remark that second-wave feminists and critical anthropologists now question
the nature of our relationship to our subjects and
examine the way in which our writing reects the
power relations embedded in the research setting.
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were now fully equipped with three important paradigms. The rst was to critically address issues of
othering other women in the eldwork setting
that came with true incorporation of a decolonized
eort in feminist anthropological scholarship. The
second paradigm was the ability to apply an intersectional lens not only in their scholarship as a
way of understanding social structures but also to
be of use while encountering a range of social formations in their own everyday life. Finally, when
adopting Brackette Williams concept of fellow citizenship, whereby what must be done, why it must
be done, and what are the consequences of doing
it one way and not another became an essential
habit in doing ones homework in both research
in the eld and on the home front in the department and the academy at large.
There is no doubt that the discipline of
anthropology reinvented itself to address the populations and issues traditionally studied, by whom,
in what ways, and toward what end (Cole 2001:x).
The substantial changes over the course of two
decades (1960s1970s) laid the foundation for feminist anthropology. However, despite all of the
embracing of dierences among folk in the eld,
and the use of various theories to understand the
variation in humankind, the determining locus and
structure of power still is in place. Suggested practices of decolonization, intersectional thinking, and
doing ones fellow citizenry homework conict
with White privilege, the dominant discourse of
everyday living in the United States. Almost all
anthropology departments3 are profoundly situated in predominately White locations and the
majority of anthropologists are white women. Was
it dierent when the majority of anthropologists
were canon-setting White men? Yes. When the
vast majority of anthropologists were White men,
their female counterparts (of course there were
exceptions) were often marginal to the benets of
membership and their scholarship was devalued as
examined by numerous authors (Morgen 1988). As
the predominately White academy expanded to
include womens studies and African American
studies more Black women entered the eld of
anthropology. Given the history of the marginalization of White women scholars in anthropology,
it seems expected that the discipline would
embrace the Black women who chose the eld as a
career. There are great champions among women
anthropologists who took great strides to open the
doors allowing more women to enter the academy
and who remained in departments. If this is the
case, why are feminist Black anthropologists
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and its relationship to Womens Studies scholarship. It was in those pages that British feminist
anthropologist, Henrietta Moores book, Feminism
and Anthropology (1989) surfaced as an important
text.
Moores text provided a signicant amount of
information about the history of anthropology
and its women contributors. However, it was a
great disappointment in terms of the way women
of Africa and those of African descent become
subjects from the eld and any other theoretical
contributions were viewed as just identity politics. Moore contributed to the invisibility of Black
feminist anthropologists because she relied on
White feminist anthropologists to provide her
material, all of who drew a blank on the scholarship of their Black feminist colleagues. As a scholar of great stature herself, Henrietta Moore could
have looked more carefully into who was excluded
from feminist anthropological scholarship and
included those scholars in her own work. There
are seven Black women anthropologists, six of
whom are African born or based (ve working on
the continent, one primarily in India), and one is
African American, Diane Lewis. Moore found herself relying on the theoretical contributions of
Black American literary critics such as bell hooks,
and the But Some of us Are Brave contributors to
make her argument. U.S. feminist anthropologists
did not cite their Black feminist colleagues; therefore, their body of work was excluded from this
inuential, but exclusionary scholarship.
Another example of exclusion came from a
highly acclaimed volume, Michaela di Leonardos
(1991) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge. In
her introduction, Di Leonardo recounted her perspective on the theoretical shift staking place in
feminist anthropological projects and its relation
to the history of the discipline at large. A point is
made that unlike the early bibles of feminist
anthropology, not all the contributors are White
women. Here in Gender at the Crossroads the
contributors include one man, and two women of
color, (Patricia Zavella and African American biological anthropologist Nadine Peacock). In terms
of the inclusion of Black feminist anthropological
thought, there was none. There were no references
in the introduction and a handful of names were
randomly scattered in citations throughout the
essays.
Following the celebration of the 25th anniversary of the two foundational texts, Louise Lamphere, Helena Ragone, and Patricia Zavella
published Situated Lives Gender and Culture in
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her manuscripts out to countless numbers of publishers, but no one was interested even in her life
history of the seminal Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz. Even today when the rejection letters
arrive, it is either straight to the point, or it
includes the readers comments. Here, academics
enjoy being rather viscous. A reviewer for a
recently rejected manuscript on anthropology,
racism and the academy implied on how could a
well-respected (read White) feminist scholar be
associated with such ridiculous ideas and worthless
scholarship.
When the work is nally published the publisher becomes a cause for concern, especially for
consideration for tenure and promotion. This policy is repeated in the evaluation of journals. Even
though Transforming Anthropology is a referred
journal, published under the auspices of the American Anthropological Association, an institution
engaged in a debate whether or not considered in
a Black scholars promotion and tenure le.
CONCLUSION
The goal of Telling the Story Straight was to
address the omissions, the exclusions, and extra
burdens faced by Black feminist anthropologists
who, as Langston Hughes reminds us, are Black
and beautiful. White privilege permeates the very
fabric of U.S. society and is found in the personal
and politics of anthropologists and in the academy.
Without understanding this fundamental aspect of
U.S. culture and society, the eorts of decolonizing
feminist anthropology, entails doing homework in
every eld of endeavor, particularly at home, in the
oce, and at the university. There must be broad
transformative practice of inclusion in hiring, earning tenure, inviting contributors on annual meeting
sessions and in editing collections, reviewing processes, and in the practice of citation. When these
eorts are in place in ones mind and actualized in
practice then we can all move forward to a more
equitable place. As of 2011, there were approximately a dozen Black women anthropologists who
hold the rank of full professor. The academy, as a
reection of society, is not a crystal staircase for
women, especially if they are non-White. Naturally
there are exceptions and they have their own stories to tell. Included in the group are those who
not only achieved the highest level in the academy
but also maintained that stature, such as Johnnetta
B. Cole, Claudia Mitchell Kernan, Yolanda T.
Moses, and Leith Mullings.
A number of years ago, after presenting a
paper at Barnard College, a senior colleague asked
NOTES
1. Thank you to the anonymous reviewers,
Cheryl Mwaria, Alaka Wali, Karen Brodkin, and
my Sister Black Women Anthropologists, especially the ancestors.
2. www.aaanet.org/about/Governance/committees-commissions.cfm.
3. The Department of Anthropology at Howard University, a Historical Black College/University (HBCU) was targeted for elimination in 2011.
4. Research on citation by and on Black
women anthropologists using the Social Web as a
primary source is an aspect of new project.
5. Among this group are Leith Mullings,
Gwendolyn Mikell, Sheila Walker, Patricia Guthrie, Carolyn Martin Shaw, Yolanda Moses, Susan
Brown, Yvonne Jones, and Victoria Durant
Gonzalez.
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Supporting Information
Additional Supporting Information may be
found in the online version of this article:
Appendix S1. List of Ph.D. Black Women
Anthropologists in the Academy 12/12 Unocial.
Lynn Bolles
71